Currently, enormous amounts of waste heat are generated daily by a wide variety of industrial and commercial processes and operations. These range, typically, from waste heat from space heating operations, process steam boiler waste heat, mechanical and electrical system cooling, and the like. Typically, the waste heat is low grade, that is, it is below about 350° F., and often below about 250° F., a value so low that conventional heat recovery systems do not operate with sufficient efficiency to make recovery of energy from such sources economical. The net result is that vast quantities of waste heat are simply dumped to atmosphere, ground or water thereby contributing to the overall greenhouse effect and effectively raising the cost of operations.
Except for low efficiency photovoltaic cells, solar energy systems produce hot gases or fluids of maximum temperatures well below the range needed to function as power sources. Rather, solar energy is predominantly used for space heating and hot water generation, since those applications only require delivered temperature values on the order of 100–150° F., which are just low enough to match the AH that can be extracted from the solar system output.
Accordingly, there is a pressing need to provide a system and method for cost effective recovery of power from low-grade waste heat and solar systems thereby improving the overall efficiency of power generation from energy sources, including fossil fuels and solar energy, which system can be adapted to stationary power generation, or be configured for portablility as a skid-mounted modular unit.